Vintage Asylum: Re: vintage v contemporary high end amp by Bold Eagle

I'll take a shot at this, having just gone through the process of making such a decision. I don't know if you'd qualify my recent stuff as "high end", but it's pretty good.

I have had an NAD C350 integrated amp from 2001, an Adcom GTP-350/GFA-535 II tuner-preamp/power amp from about 1993, an Onkyo Integra TX-870 receiver (1989-90), a Kenwood KR-6050 receiver (1979-80), Pioneer SX-828 (1972), Pioneer SA-8100 (1973), Sherwood S-7200 (1972), H-K 730 (1974?), Technics SA-5360 (1976) and a Marantz 2270 (1973) and tried them all with my JBL L-110's and Advents, and most with the KLH 17's.

The answer is: "it all depends". The Advent and JBL speakers are modded, and the KLH-17's were restored and had a 0.47 ohm resistor added in series. The KLH-17's sounded best with the Adcom pair by a large margin. The Advents (stock or modded) sound best with the Onkyo receiver and stock ones are pretty good (but different) with the SX-828. The JBL's were hands down best with the NAD followed by the Adcom and Onkyo, but the mid and tweeter L-pads needed to be reset slightly for best sound with each. The later Kenwood KR-6050 sounded more like the NAD than did any of the other receivers but lacked the NAD's sense of bass power (see below).

Bottom line is that it's all about matching, and the ranking of various speaker/amp pairings will depend on the room, the speaker, the speaker settings (if there are any), and the listener's tastes.

I also found a number of problems with most of these amps with tone controls that were not at their flattest settings at 12 o'clock, balance controls that did not give equal output when centered, and mismatched left channel/right channel tone controls. The NAD was perfect right out of the box, the Pioneers were both very close, and the Kenwood KR-6050 was decent. Everything else needed some work or recalibration. Once that was done, things could be compared on an apples to apples basis. If that's not done, it's a crap shoot.

In one respect, two of the amps stand apart from the others. The NAD C-350 and the Onkyo TX-870 have a much more powerful sounding bass than any of the others. It isn't simply frequency response or Damping Factor at work. On bass drums, for example, those two just produced more low bass output than the others.

If I had to make just one response, it would be that newer amps of better quality are somewhat better than the best vintage (1980 and earlier) receivers.

Jerry